Spent 3 nights in Moret-sur-Loing. A pretty, friendly little town with all facilities including a great fish shop and a reasonable supermarket. The mooring is high quality pontoons at only €9 per night – and the third night is free. All with water and electricity thrown in. We met a lovely Irish couple – Mike and Roseanne on Aquarelle and also swapped stories with Sandra and Don on Gadabout – a fascinating little long boat.
On Tuesday, we decided to go up the Petit Seine part of the way as we only really have to do 10K to Montereau for Wednesday night to pick up Mike and Linda. Above the Yonne, the Seine gets considerably smaller and faster. It is also much more rural, winding through apparently deserted forest – until every now and again you come across a small patch of heavy industry – mostly sand and gravel quarrying but also some silos. I expected that the commercial traffic would die away – but it really hasn’t. We meet small ro large Peniches at every lock either going the same way as us or the the other and sometimes both. We passed at least one per hour going the other way too.
The locks are mostly fairly easy although they are mostly higher than on the Haute Seine. One of them is corrugated Iron which makes life more interesting with the fendering. Thank heavens for the barge boards!
When we got to Jaulnes, there were Peniches everywhere. 4 in the lock going up, 3 more waiying to come down and another huge one in front of us waiting to go up. It looked like a long queue and we couldn’t raise the lock keeper on VHF so I suspect he was manning 2 or more locks and had got into a bit of a pickle! We gave up on Noyen as it was already 1745 and there was still another lock to go.
We returned to Bray and moored at the halt de Plaisance which is a basic but functional pontoon. Lindsay tried ferry gliding in the strong current for the first time with considerable success.
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